This invention relates to determination of the propensity of polymers to emit smoke during processing.
Polymers can emit smoke during extrusion and blow molding. The amount of smoke emitted will vary, depending upon which polymers are being processed. Because of the need to protect employees and equipment, it would be useful to evaluate, before full scale production runs, the propensity of any given polymer to emit smoke during processing.
Current ways of determining smoking propensity such as HPLC or conventional use of smoke detection devices have limitations such as:
(1) length of time required for analysis; PA1 (2) dependence upon indirect inference of smoke; PA1 (3) large variability and operator specificity; and PA1 (4) requirement for sampling to be done on full scale equipment, thus necessitating large samples.